


In Memoriam

by ShariDeschain



Category: Batman - All Media Types, Batman and Robin (Comics), Grayson (Comics)
Genre: Angst and Feels, Batfam Week 2018, Drinking to Cope, Gen, Grief/Mourning
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-29
Updated: 2018-07-29
Packaged: 2019-06-18 08:27:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,280
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15481710
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ShariDeschain/pseuds/ShariDeschain
Summary: “You ever lost a partner?”, Tiger asks.Ghost fingers wraps themselves around Dick’s arm. They’re cold, and very small. Feels like they can barely circle his wrist. The fingers of a child."No", Dick answers.





	In Memoriam

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the [BatfamWeek2018](https://batfamweek2018.tumblr.com/) Day 1 - ~~Vacations~~ or **Separation**.

He finds him in an anonymous bar, half hidden in the shadow of a corner table. The music is loud, the air is filled with smoke and the stench of old dirt. There are several empty beer glasses piled on the table, all sorted into neat rows, like a battleship game grid. Agent 1 himself looks like he’s sinking, half lying on the bench, expensive clothes now looking like dirty rags. But his eyes are burning cold, the eyes of someone who actually survived the shipwreck and is very angry about it. It’s a look Dick knows by heart.

“Well, good evening to you too, Big One”, he greets him, pulling out a chair to sit in front of the other man. He smiles a big, fat, fake smile.

“Go away”, is what he gets in response. 

It’s a quiet, dangerous growl, one that say _if you’re smart, you won’t fuck with me_. Dick is completely immune to it. Heard it one too many times a long, long time ago, when he still thought that acrobatic leotards and yellow capes were a cool idea for a costume. 

He leans back against the chair, elbows spread out.

“Been looking for your pretty face for three days now”, Dick offers back. “Matron is a little worried. Not like she would say it, of course.”

“Of course”, Tiger echoes, as he raises another glass to his lips.

Dick gives him ten minute of comfortable silence, then another five. He’s not going to be the first to push this. He knows better than that.

It takes Tiger another two beers to address Dick’s existence again.

“You ever lost a partner?”, he asks, words just a little bit slurred around their ends, and the question lays flat between them for a moment, quiet and deceptively harmless in the confusion of the electronic music pounding hard all around them.

Ghost fingers wraps themselves around Dick’s arm. They’re cold, and very small. Feels like they can barely circle his wrist. The fingers of a child.

Once - and it had been at the very beginning of their partnership - Dick had been awakened by those cold little fingers. Damian had probably thought he was too out of it to notice, thanks to some drugs forced upon him by a very creative minion of the Joker, so the kid had felt safe enough to press his hand against Dick’s larger one, palm against palm. Measuring, comparing. 

It had been such a sweet, childish gesture, and the memory of that soft touch is still so intense to make his chest hurt. 

Especially because Damian’s never going to do it again, and their hands will never be the same size. Just like Damian’s never going to get taller than Dick - it was a matter of genetic: they both had known it would’ve happened eventually, and the idea obviously made Damian gleeful, while Dick used to grimace a little at the very thought of it. Now there’s nothing he wouldn’t give to see that day, to hold a hand as big as his own, to see the man Damian never got to become.

“No”, Dick answers after a beat, looking at the intricate design of cobwebs on the ceiling over their heads. “Never.”

Tiger snorts, then he hands him a beer.

“Here, then”, he says. “Drink for one of mine.”

Dick drinks.

*

Alcohol keeps flowing freely. If it’s a game, no one is winning.

“He wasn’t just my partner”, Dick starts eventually.

It’s been three hours of silence and who knows how many beers since he joined Tiger’s drunk vigil, and it’s starting to feel right. He barely had the time to mourn when it was the right time to, and it had been a messy, lonely affair, up until he’d been forced to put it aside anyway. He’s been putting it aside for months now.

He needs a few minutes to continue. Tiger doesn’t push. Time doesn’t seem to have any power here, between them.

“He was my…”, his voice trails off again, wet words getting caught in somewhere between his throat and his guilt. “He was a kid.”

Tiger looks at him for the first time tonight.

“Your kid?”, he asks, alcohol roughing up his voice.

The _no_ doesn’t come out of his mouth as quickly as it used to do before, so Dick takes his time to think about it. 

He considers the facts. Damian had been a kid. And he’d been _Dick’s_ as much as he’d been Bruce’s. Their Robin. Their partner. Their kid.

Semantically speaking, it isn’t incorrect.

“Yes”, he answers then, quietly.

“I’m sorry.”

“Me too”, Dick says. “About Alia. And… and the others.”

He should probably make an effort to find out exactly _how many_ others, because it’s something Bruce would want to know. But he’s already lost count of the beers, he doesn’t want to lose count of the dead too. Doesn’t feel right.

“It’s like losing a hand, or your legs”, he continues instead, words coming from some place of his mind he wasn’t aware he’d been nurturing. “And you try do things the same way you used to, but you can’t, because something is missing. And sometimes you forget that you’re missing it, but it’s not for long. Never for long. And then you remember, and it’s like losing it all over again. Your hands, your legs, your… I don’t know”, there’s some unexpect wetness on his face, Dick notices, but it’s almost absent-mindedly. The good thing about getting drunk is that you forget you’re not supposed to get drunk in the first place. “It’s why I’m doing this, why I’m Agent 37 now. Because I do this, so I’m here, and a part of me is convinced that he’s at home, that if I don’t see him is just because I’m here and he’s there and we’re too busy for a call. But at least he exist, you know? In my mind, he’s home playing with his pets, or fighting someone three times bigger than him. And sometimes I’m really convinced that this separation will end the moment I’ll go home… and then I never go home. You understand?”

“Yes”, Tiger says. And he looks like he means it. Come thinking about it, Dick doesn’t know where Tiger’s home is, or if he even has one. 

He closes his eyes for a moment. He feels like sleeping, but he can’t sleep here. He was supposed to be back hours ago. Helena is so going to kick his ass for this. Bruce would too, if he could. 

“We should go back”, he adds after a while.

Tiger nods, then he lifts his finger again and two new beers appear on the now overflowed table.

“Oh, c’mon”, Dick groans weakly, rubbing his hands over his face. “How are you even alive at this point? I surrender. You beat me. That’s what you want to hear?”

“I beat you the moment you walked into this bar”, Tiger answers with no hint of irony whatsoever. “But we’ll have a last one. For your kid. Then we’ll go back.”

Dick’s not sure he’ll still be able to stand after another beer. He doesn’t remember the last time he hit the bottom like that, but it had to be before Damian, that’s for sure. Because when Damian came into his life, he forced himself to be the best man he could be. The best partner. The best father. Now he’ll probably have to crawl back to a place that’s not his house, to people that are not his family. So, in the end, who cares? 

He raises his glass one last time, bumps it against Tiger’s and drinks.


End file.
